


Notes on the Shape of Absence

by cosmicbluebells



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Exes to Lovers, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-19 11:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29873892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicbluebells/pseuds/cosmicbluebells
Summary: Kojiro was twenty-two years old the first time he let himself think about Kaoru properly, about the soft tilt of his mouth when he concentrated and the silkiness of his hair and the way he kissed Kojiro, hard and hungry and fierce with desire, like every kiss was another guarantee.He's twenty-eight, now. Kaoru is here. He looks older, wrinkles in the corners of his eyes and a world-weariness about him. He has longer hair, fewer piercings; sadness pooling in the recesses of his amber-coloured eyes that wasn’t there before.Kojiro is still in love with him. That much hasn’t changed.Six years later, Kaoru comes home.
Relationships: Nanjo Kojiro | Joe/Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom
Comments: 33
Kudos: 313





	Notes on the Shape of Absence

**Author's Note:**

> back on my sk8 bullshit again orz,,, part 2 of 'i make miya and shadow sort out matchablossom's relationship because they can't do it themselves'
> 
> (not beta-ed or edited.)

The first time Kojiro sees him, he thinks it’s a dream. 

He turns the street corner and spots the last traces of hair disappearing behind a building up ahead. The pink tips flutter like autumn leaves. 

He almost calls, “Kaoru!” before he remembers that Kaoru hasn’t been back to Okinawa in six years, and then he stops short.

He clenches his fists. It isn’t the first time he’s mistaken someone else for Kaoru; even an automated robot voice is enough to make his pulse race, and then he looks around and—inevitably—doesn’t find a trace of Kaoru.

Kojiro is used to searching for Kaoru. He’s been doing it all his life. 

Six years and he still doesn’t know how to react when someone asks what Kaoru’s up to—six years and he still can’t bring himself to look at his high school photos without the prickling cold of loneliness poking him hard in the ribs, making him feel like some absurd caricature of a thoughtless boy that never learned how to love in the first place.

He turns on his heel to walk back. 

A cherry blossom floats down and lands softly on the pavement.

━━━━━━

Sakurayashiki Kaoru hasn’t been part of Kojiro’s life for six-odd years, and yet he tops the list of people Kojiro thinks about most often.

Kaoru is a difficult person to forget. He is many things—bright and cold and elegant and sharp like tempered glass. But ‘forgettable’ is not one of them.

There are memories Kojiro dredges up from nowhere, ones that didn’t mean particularly much to him in the moment but he now drinks up like he’s dying of thirst—the mole on Kaoru’s jaw, how tightly he’d held onto Kojiro’s hand when he got his lip piercing, the way they used to jump out of their bedroom windows in the dead of the night to go to the skate park.

Then some memories stay at the forefront of Kojiro’s mind constantly, and those are the ones that tend to hurt the most. Like scratches and scrapes that never fully heal over.

Hunting in every corner of the museum for Kaoru’s wallet on their high school field trip, and the smile on Kaoru’s face when he finally presented it to him, even though he landed a punch to Kojiro’s shoulder right afterwards.

Being nineteen years old, reckless and dumb. Using their phones’ translator apps to find a restaurant in Los Angeles, screaming at each other and trying to kick the other off the sidewalk all the while. Kaoru pinning him down to the crappy mattress in their motel and kissing him stupid, mumbling his name against his skin like a prayer.

Twenty years, the plane ride to France and Kaoru’s head on his shoulder, his breathing slow and steady, his hair brushing Kojiro’s collarbone, and Kojiro trying to remember the last time so much of his love was contained in one person. Afterwards, a Paris bar with the best single-malt whisky Kojiro’s ever tried and an alcoholic content that made the two of them flush bright red after two shots. When he kissed Kaoru that night, his lips tasted like bourbon and caramel.

Twenty-one at a hotel in Taoyuan, Taiwan, five hundred miles away from their hometown. Cars honking outside, Kojiro wondering why they’d booked a room with two beds when they usually just got one. Kaoru saying, “This isn’t sustainable.” 

Kaoru telling him he wasn’t going back to Okinawa.

Kojiro saying things he regretted right afterwards, things that caused Kaoru’s face to crumple up like old scrap paper and fall apart in the same breath.

Kojiro remembers the air conditioner whirring in the background and the sound of frying food on the street corner below them and the look on Kaoru’s face. Resigned and unflinching and stricken. 

He remembers how cold the other side of the bed was, that night.

No matter how hard he tries to push it out of his head, it hangs over him like a cloud of glass shards.

Six years. That part still feels like a pile of broken splinters stabbing into his skin.

━━━━━━

Kojiro’s making drinks at the bar of _Sia La Luce_ when the doorbell tinkles. He calls brightly, “Welcome! What can I get for you?”

He blinks, and Kaoru is standing in front of him, glasses perched carefully on his nose and honey-golden eyes peering over them, rose-coloured hair swept over one shoulder.

Kojiro feels like he’s been punched in the gut.

Kaoru looks so _familiar_ , but his gaze is uncomfortable and suddenly Kojiro feels the hollow space squeeze in on him, the rift between the rebellious, self-conscious teenager he knew and the man who stands in front of him today—confident and composed and still somehow everything Kojiro fell in love with.

Kojiro’s breath catches in his throat. “…Kaoru,” he stammers. “Seat—I mean, sit down. You can grab a menu.”

“Thank you,” Kaoru answers calmly, and the aloofness in his voice makes Kojiro’s chest seize up. He sits down at the bar and folds his hands on the table. “Take your time. I’m not in a hurry.”

Kojiro turns away and practically runs to the kitchen.

━━━━━━

Hiroko finds him sitting next to the back door of the restaurant, his shoulders pressed against the cold brick wall. The sea breeze wafts over his head and the smell of cooking food filters out of the open windows. “You have one more minute before you have to come back,” she says, and it’s an indication of how often Kojiro subjects her to his dramatics that she doesn’t even pretend to acknowledge the crisis he’s in. “There are a ton of customers.”

“Okay,” he replies, letting out a shaky breath. He kicks at a pebble and it rolls away. “Just a second.”

“Something wrong?” And there’s the kicker, there’s the note of worry in her voice, because despite Kojiro’s propensity for emotional turmoil, he’s never this apprehensive about anything.

“You could say that,” he snorts, gaze fixed on the moon, big and bright like a silver dollar coin and crisscrossed with slumping electrical lines. “I’ll be fine in a moment.”

Hiroko’s eyes don’t leave him as he stands up and brushes the dust off his pants. They head inside. Kojiro walks to the sink to wash his hands. Then he pastes a smile on his face and walks out of the kitchen.

Kaoru is still there, but the menu is gone and he’s clicking a ballpoint pen between his fingers absent-mindedly. _Click. Click_.

“Evening,” Kojiro greets him, and he looks up, startled.

“Hello.”

“How are you today?” he asks. He’s not used to keeping this degree of distance between them, nor the formality, but he swallows down the dry feeling in his throat and continues anyway. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”

Kaoru nods. “You look different,” he comments casually. Kojiro wants so badly to ask: _different how?_ but he just shrugs. 

“Consequences of getting old, I suppose,” he responds.

Kaoru looks away. A lock of hair falls into his face. “True.”

Hiroko steps in and slides a plate of pasta in front of Kaoru. She whispers, “Go take the other orders, there’s a party of six at table four.”

He tips his head and walks away.

He doesn’t talk to Kaoru again, too busy bouncing between the tables and the kitchen to strike up any sort of conversation. But Kaoru is an omnipresent figure in the background all evening, with his archaic clothing and billowing pink hair, and Kojiro finds it difficult to tear his eyes away from him.

All the customers are tipsy and loud and unruly, commenting on the football game playing on the television. 

Except for Kaoru, who sips placidly at his water and curls in on himself when the volume in the restaurant peaks.

Hiroko has already left by the time Kaoru finishes eating; almost everyone else is gone too, so Kojiro grabs a few towels to wipe down the counters.

“Have a good night,” he calls as Kaoru stands up to leave, hand lifted in a wave. “I’ll see you around.”

Kaoru looks back and answers, “You too. Thanks for the food.”

“No problem. I look forward to seeing you again.” It’s what he says to everyone, but the words are familiar, too close to something he’s said before. In another country, in another time.

Kaoru stiffens. He keeps walking.

The bell tinkles. Kojiro clenches his fingers into a fist and puffs out a breath.

━━━━━━

When Kojiro was twenty-two years old, only a month or two after his birthday, he made a list called, ‘how to get over Sakurayashiki Kaoru.’ It’s still hidden somewhere in a cranny of his childhood bedroom, written on lined paper smudged with pencil marks and tears.

Back then, Kojiro was foolish and more hot-headed than he is now. He’d believe anything if it came out of Kaoru’s mouth. That they could become the best skaters in Okinawa if they tried hard enough, that Adam wasn’t worth their time, that the only real way to be successful in skateboarding was to have another job, because Kaoru was always the cold cynic in their friendship.

The predictions came true often enough that Kojiro never developed a sense of skepticism.

So he believed Kaoru when he said he loved him back. 

And later, he believed Kaoru when he said it would be easy for them both to move on.

And yet. He’s never moved on, not in the way that Kaoru expected him to. 

But he followed every bullet point of that list with religious precision, getting up and skating to work every day and tying his apron like the mere memory of skating down the very same streets with Kaoru by his side wasn’t tearing him apart inside. Like his hand didn’t feel awfully empty without Kaoru holding it; like the sight of a cherry blossom was just the seasons changing and not the universe was conspiring against him.

And weeks went by, then months, and then Kojiro had to face the facts: of all the things Kaoru told him, he couldn’t stand to believe this one anymore.

One does not simply _move on_ from Sakurayashiki Kaoru. 

There’s a specific threshold of pain you have to withstand first; the pain of living, the pain of breathing, the pain of seeing _him_ , with all his rough edges and sharp words and insults, and choosing him over and over again anyway. 

Love comes first, naturally. It fades to the background eventually, a vignette brushing the corners of the pages in blackened starlight, but it never goes away. 

Next is resentment. It only lasts a few hours at most, because hating Kaoru is more difficult than forgetting him altogether.

Acceptance. 

Grief. 

Then a reminder comes, like the smell of his coconut shampoo or the clear golden glow of his eyes, ripping holes in the carefully-constructed veneer you’ve put up in his absence. It plants a seed of something fragile and delicate in your chest but steals your breath all the while. You start to dread seeing another reminder.

And it would be wrong to call it a _cycle_ , because the love doesn’t start afresh, the love doesn’t change. Just like you can never go back to the time you thought it was even possible to move on in the first place. 

But the emotions spin like the wheels of a skateboard, messier and more worn-down each time, and you wish _for once_ , you could hear his name without thinking anything of it at all. Without feeling like you’ve been scraped against the asphalt and dragged downhill until you’re struggling for air.

━━━━━━

The second time Kojiro sees him, he’s halfway through his morning run when he spots Kaoru standing on the beach, wind whipping around his face and skateboard tucked under his arm.

Kojiro takes off his shoes and steps down onto the sand carefully, the ground soft under his feet and rocks digging into his toes.

Kaoru glances at him, arching a perfectly-shaped eyebrow, and voices coldly, “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” Kojiro says, in lieu of a proper response. “What about you?”

Kaoru scowls and looks back out at the horizon. “None of your business.”

Kojiro ignores him. “So you’re moving back here?” The thoughts in his head collide into a wreck of ‘please say no’ and ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if you say yes,’ but his heart thuds all the while: _say yes, say yes_.

Kaoru closes his eyes and adjusts his glasses. “I’m still thinking about it,” he answers vaguely. “Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Kojiro grins, bitter. It _does_ matter, a whole lot, and Kaoru knows it. “Let me know when you find out.”

The conversation is stilted. Kojiro thinks he’d give anything to have the effortlessness he used to have with Kaoru, just for a while.

“How was Taiwan?” he asks instead. The wind stings his eyes.

Kaoru’s mouth twists and he exhales sharply. “Why are you asking me this, Kojiro?”

“I can’t try to be nice to you?” he says, deflecting. “Wow, Kaoru. How rude.” The contours of Kaoru’s name are still natural on his tongue. He squeezes his eyes shut. The breeze ruffles his hair.

Kaoru’s eyes narrow, lashes brushing over his cheekbones and casting long shadows in the dawn light. “Not without a reason.”

Kojiro leans back. “Never mind, then. I’ll catch you later.” He climbs back up the rocks to the running path, ignoring the gritty sand lodged in his shoes. 

He passes by again twenty minutes later, on the way back from his run. Kaoru is still there. 

He cuts a lonely figure, alight in the iridescent glow of sunrise. Brilliant and beautiful, _always_ beautiful, his arms crossed tightly over his chest and pink hair cascading down his back.

Kojiro tamps down the fire burning in his chest—charring the corners of his cauterized heart with paper-curls of smoke—and keeps running.

━━━━━━

He isn’t surprised to see Kaoru at ‘S’ that night. The skateboarding scene in Okinawa is lively as ever, and Kojiro knows if he hadn’t been there for six years, he wouldn’t have wasted a second coming back.

Kaoru is only familiar with some of the older skaters, the ones who’d practically raised them as high schoolers, and Kojiro notices him huddled with a few of them on the sidelines. 

His eyes examine the track with practiced ease, skimming over the crowd to observe the sharp turns and steep ramps visible from the starting line.

‘S’ is the one constant for Kojiro; somewhere along the way, it had morphed from a place he went to with Kaoru into a place he went to alone, then into a place he just went to because it was fun and he liked winning and it was the one time he could act as foolhardy as he wanted without repercussions.

Kojiro snags a spot near Miya and throws his jacket into the crowd. “Going to win today?” he asks the boy. Miya is always one of the most fun skaters to compete against—brash and careless yet perfectly poised every step of the way, raw talent packaged with a healthy dose of childhood hubris.

Miya frowns. “Of course I am,” he answers, sure and confident. “I don’t lose.”

Neither of them ends up winning; Kojiro catches an edge on a nasty corner that kills all his momentum, and Miya comes in second place after an upset in the abandoned factory.

Kaoru gets first place. A path of dust flies up behind the wheels of his board. The rest of the horde is hot on his heels, but he edges over the finish line half a second before Miya, and by the time the last person makes it, he’s standing in the middle of the ring, squinting at the harsh lights overhead.

A wave of confusion ripples through the crowd at the shock of an unknown rookie—the masked skater with everything and nothing to lose— _winning_ , but they all end up clapping anyway. 

Kojiro claps along with them until his hands are sore and the tight feeling of loss in his chest dissipates.

Kaoru’s eyes are unreadable under his mask, his ponytail tumbling down his back gracefully, not even a hair out of place. He picks up his board and the edges glow purple.

Miya jabs Kojiro in the rib. “Who’s that?” he mumbles, looking simultaneously curious and impossibly jealous, a fire burning bright in his eyes. He plays with the drawstrings of his hoodie.

Kojiro swallows, staring hard at his feet. “Cherry Blossom. We’re—we used to be friends.” It’s a gross oversimplification of whatever relationship they had, but Kojiro thinks it’s probably best not to burden a child with his love problems. “He came back to Japan recently.”

“He has a robot board,” Miya points out, eyes widening.

Kojiro hums. “Her name is Carla,” he says faintly. “He built her himself. Eight years ago.”

“Are you still friends?”

Kaoru skates off in the opposite direction. Kojiro watches him as he goes.

In response to Miya’s raised eyebrow, he lets his lips quirk into the closest approximation of a smile he can muster. _You don’t know half of it_. “No,” he answers slowly. “But Kaoru is…difficult to forget. He’s quite a character.” 

Every word is tinged with yearning, nostalgia—an ache for something that isn’t there anymore.

He closes his mouth. He can’t decide if he’s grateful or not that Miya doesn’t ask any more questions. 

The two of them walk back into the crush of skaters, jam-packed and dizzying. Kojiro’s head spins, and he’s quickly pulled away to one side and surrounded by a group of people peppering him with shouts.

He fends off questions about Kaoru for the next half-hour, saying over and over again (in no particular order), “He left Japan for a while but he’s back now. Sorry, you can’t buy a skateboard like that. We were high school friends. No, we’re not together.”

He’s thrown off his rhythm by a girl asking, “But _were_ you together?” She looks up at him expectantly, understanding and inquisitive, and Kojiro realizes he might be letting on too much.

His shoulders tighten. A flurry of answers swirl in his brain like they’re going through a turnstile: _we were more than that. I still_ wish _we were more than that, sometimes. I’d like to be more than that again, if he’ll let me._

He shakes his head to get rid of the thoughts, grinning. “Of course not. What made you think that?”

“You sound sad when you talk about him,” she notes. “Like there’s something you regret.”

Kojiro laughs. “I regret a lot of things.” He can’t hide the dash of acidity staining his voice, so he doesn’t even try. 

The girl’s gaze is piercing, but she doesn’t say anything. 

She walks away and Kojiro is left there alone, watching Kaoru disappear (all over again) as he jumps on his motorcycle and drives away into the darkness.

━━━━━━

Kojiro doesn’t see him for the next three days. 

Kaoru doesn’t return to _Sia La Luce_ , nor the skate track. Kojiro has almost given up looking for him, fallen back into the familiar flickers of disappointment that he’s felt for the past six years.

Now that he knows Kaoru is here, living in a house only five miles up the road from his restaurant, it’s like a switch has been flipped and he can’t let it go. He thinks he might be nineteen years old again. 

He picks up the phone to text Kaoru in case he wants to go to the skate park; he finds himself stepping out the door to look for Kaoru in their old hideouts. He goes to the market and puts Kaoru’s favourite snacks into his shopping cart. And then it hits him like a freight train: Kaoru is back, but not in the way Kojiro wishes he was.

In part, it’s strangely relieving that he doesn’t have to wake up and wonder where Kaoru is in the world—Taoyuan or Kuala Lumpur or Almaty, all hundreds of miles away from Okinawa—or if he’s been injured, or if he still thinks about Kojiro.

But there’s a new dead weight attached to his ankle, memories upon memories stitched into years of longing he can no longer avoid. Because Kaoru is _here_ , Kaoru is alive and real and more than a name that occasionally floats around his restaurant, and Kojiro’s perpetual excuse of ‘it doesn’t matter, he’s gone now’ won’t work.

Kaoru is paralyzing in his beauty and sharpness, so pretty it hurts to watch him sometimes, and so elegant it hurts _more_ to look away. 

Kojiro isn’t even sure if he wants to.

━━━━━━

In an insular, coastal part of Okinawa—a tourist trap with the majority of its population concentrated in resort enclaves and sandy beaches far away from the local hot spots—Kojiro knows almost everyone who comes into his restaurant by name.

He has customers that are more regular than others, of course, and repeat visits outnumber new clientele by a three to one ratio. 

It’s gotten to the point where he and Hiroko have made a game out of telling who’s at the door based on how their footsteps echo against the wooden floor.

It’s late at night—the sign on the door has been flipped to ‘CLOSED’ and the lights are dim, a mop leaning against the counter. Kojiro is practically half-asleep. He goes through the motions of wiping down the tables mechanically.

The door jingles. Someone steps in, their footsteps light, and Kojiro doesn’t know who it is but he looks up with his customary grin anyway. He starts to say, “Sorry, we’re closed, come again tomorrow—”

It’s Kaoru, looking awfully hesitant. His _yukata_ brushes against the slippery wooden floors and his hair is pushed back in a loose ponytail. He nudges his glasses up his nose with a finger. 

Kojiro silently sets down his towel and points at a bar stool. Kaoru sits down, dutiful.

He’s quiet as Kojiro finishes clean-up, tapping his fingers on the bar and leafing through an appetizer menu. 

The proud slope of Kaoru’s nose is graceful in the low light of the restaurant, backlit by a warm yellow glow, and the frames of his glasses glint brightly.

“Fine, I’ll bite,” Kojiro says finally, after almost five minutes of admiring Kaoru’s side profile. He rests an elbow on the counter. “Why are you here?”

Kaoru looks up at him over his glasses. His eyes are huge, big and honey-coloured and too mesmerizing for Kojiro to tear his gaze away. “None of your business.”

Kojiro remembers Kaoru can be incredibly annoying when he wants to.

“Seeing as you’re literally in my restaurant, it’s very much my business, you moron,” he replies, and the comforting back-and-forth rhythm of barbed insults loosens some of the tension in his shoulders. “Spill or I’m kicking you out in…ten minutes.”

Kaoru sets down the menu and shoots him a dirty look. “I haven’t eaten all day.” A non-answer, but Kojiro opts not to push further nevertheless. 

“Why didn’t you say that first?” he says. “Tell me what you want and I’ll make it. If I have the ingredients, obviously. And it doesn’t take too long to cook.”

“Picky, aren’t we?” Kaoru states tiredly. “Make whatever.”

“Give me some ideas,” Kojiro says, rolling his eyes. “Or don’t. You can rot for all I care.”

Kaoru takes off his glasses to clean them and blinks up at Kojiro. His voice is halting. “…Omurice?”

Kojiro stares at him, disbelieving, and he remembers so many things; hot sauce packets on the side of a street market in Busan, South Korea—a Japanese fusion restaurant in Melbourne, Australia; making eggs together for breakfast in a shitty motel off the side of the Trans-Canada highway. But what comes out of his mouth is: “This is an Italian restaurant, idiot.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Kaoru tells him curtly. “You should at least have rice.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is, then?” he asks pointedly.

Kojiro opens and closes his mouth. There isn’t really a point. But he hadn’t expected Kaoru to say that—to throw their easy bickering cadence off-kilter, so he tosses up his hands and says, “Fine. Give me twenty minutes.”

He hasn’t cooked omurice in years.

They’d made it a point, intentionally or unintentionally, to find an egg dish in every city they visited. An omelette in a French cafe, eggs Benedict in Ireland, omurice in almost every major city with proper Japanese food elsewhere.

He still remembers exactly how it should taste, creamy and rich with a hint of tang, and the sizzling of the pan soothes his nerves. He tops it with a zigzag of ketchup and presents it to Kaoru.

“Thanks,” Kaoru says. He picks up his fork and cuts off a piece.

“You need to eat more, you know,” Kojiro tells him. “You’ll get sick if you don’t eat all day.”

“I’m aware,” Kaoru responds after a beat of silence. “It just slipped my mind today. I was busy.”

“Busy?” Kojiro asks, eyebrows raised. “As in…?”

“I had a lot of work to do. Calligraphy is all the rage at the moment. Everyone wants a wall hanging for their anniversary, apparently.” He stabs his fork into the center of the omelet.

Kojiro pauses. He nearly asks Kaoru what he learned in Taiwan. But he stays quiet.

He washes the pan he used and puts away the eggs while Kaoru finishes eating. “Almost time to leave,” he calls from the kitchen. “You need to sleep. I can see your eye bags, you know. You’re not good at hiding them.” They’re more pronounced in the dusky lamplight, purple shadows discolouring the skin beneath his eyes.

“I wasn’t aware this was an interrogation,” Kaoru says tersely. There are only a few bites of omurice left on his plate and he pokes at them with his fork, popping one in his mouth.

“It is now,” Kojiro shoots back. He crosses his arms over his chest defensively. “I wouldn’t _need_ to interrogate you if you actually took time to eat and sleep.”

(Waking up half-past two in the morning in a B&B in Geneva, Switzerland, snow falling to the ground in fat flakes outside, Kaoru sitting at a tiny desk with his laptop open and the parts of his skateboard spread out haphazardly on the floor. Kojiro telling him to come to bed, and Kaoru saying, “In a minute.”)

(Senior year exam week of high school, Kaoru burying his head in his physics textbook while Kojiro brought him plates of food when he forgot to eat. Kojiro always taking a minute or two to admire him, because he was beautiful even in the dead of night, and Kojiro could never resist beautiful things. Especially not when the beautiful thing in question was his best friend.)

(Dragging Kaoru out of the hotel room in Vancouver for bubble tea and those famous Japanese hot dogs right after dawn, which may not have been the best idea. But it made Kaoru smile, and that sight was worth all the caffeine-charged, sleep-deprived mornings in the world.)

Kaoru stares at him without a hint of a smile, exhaustion written all over the lines of his face. “I’ll be going now.”

Kojiro nods, holding out his hand for the plate. Kaoru gives it to him.

He places the plate in the dishwasher and heads back out. Kaoru is standing outside, head tipped up to the sky.

“Hey,” Kojiro shouts, opening the door. His voice reverberates in the quiet street. “Make sure you sleep tonight, ‘kay?”

Kaoru waves his hand. “No promises.”

“I’m serious. You’re going to run yourself into the ground.”

“…Fine,” he relents. “You too, I suppose.”

“Wow, thanks for the encouragement,” Kojiro answers sarcastically.

“Shut up, dumbass. I was trying to be nice.”

“It wasn’t working.”

Kaoru climbs onto his motorcycle, kimono billowing in the breeze from the engine, and sets off. 

Kojiro presses his lips together and blows out air.

━━━━━━

Here’s a memory Kojiro has: calling Kaoru’s number and hearing an automated voice at the other end that said: “This number is not in service.”

Kojiro was twenty-two years old the first time he let himself think about Kaoru properly, about the soft tilt of his mouth when he concentrated and the silkiness of his hair and the way he kissed Kojiro, hard and hungry and fierce with desire, like every kiss was another guarantee.

He was twenty-three when he deleted Kaoru’s number from his contact list and wiped their message history from LINE.

He was twenty-four when he got a job as a line cook at one of the best restaurants in the city and he pulled out his phone reflexively to text Kaoru. He kept it in his hand the whole night while he was out celebrating and getting drunk. As if Kaoru might realize something good had happened, all the way from his apartment in Taoyuan, and call him out of nowhere.

Twenty-five, slowly becoming more and more disillusioned with the opportunities in the restaurant industry even as he told everyone it was alright, wishing (again) Kaoru could be here. Because if he wasn’t there for Kojiro’s highs, he might at least be there for his lows.

Twenty-six, going on blind dates and setting up a Tinder account to try and find someone, anyone at all. If not Kaoru. He got a few good lays out of it but nothing permanent, and then he was back to wallowing in his own anguish.

Twenty-seven, pouring all his energy into business loans and tax payments for the restaurant he was starting from scratch, blowing off steam at ‘S’ track on the weekends. Trying desperately _not_ to think about Kaoru. Kojiro had changed since their fated trip around the world, and yet—

Twenty-eight. Kaoru is here. He looks older, wrinkles in the corners of his eyes and a world-weariness about him. He has longer hair, fewer piercings; sadness pooling in the recesses of his amber-coloured eyes that wasn’t there before.

Kojiro is still in love with him. That much hasn’t changed.

━━━━━━

He goes back to ‘S’ on his night off. He’s never been able to stay away for long. 

Koijro turns into an adrenaline junkie whenever competition is involved, so it’s no surprise that he’s drawn to the sheer exhilaration of the track and the electric-charged passion in everyone’s eyes, both too magnetic to resist.

He’s standing in the corner with Shadow when Miya comes up with bright eyes and taps him on the shoulder. “What do you know about Cherry Blossom?” he asks, practically vibrating with childish excitement. He jabs a finger at Kaoru, who’s standing in the center of a ring of skaters, evidently uncomfortable with the attention he’s getting.

Kojiro stifles an eye-roll. “Depends what you want to know,” he answers, rolling his skateboard back and forth beneath his foot.

Miya frowns. “Fine, if you want to do it like that. Why’s he so _good_?” He says the words with a touch of envy and a heaping spoonful of admiration, lip jutting out in a pout.

Shadow scowls; Kaoru’s skateboarding is a delicate subject for him, after his staggering defeat on the first night.

“Kaoru—Cherry Blossom has been skateboarding for…more than ten years?” Kojiro says, considering. “He practices a lot. He’s good at strategy. And he’s got that AI board that helps him decide what to do.”

“Do you know how he made it?” Miya’s eyes are dark and calculating, and a feeling of dread sinks in Kojiro’s stomach.

He shrugs. “You’d have to ask him.” He regrets saying it when the corners of Miya’s mouth turn up and his eyes crinkle.

“You think I can _ask_ him?” he says shrewdly. Shadow turns his head when he hears it and a flicker of interest sparks in his eyes.

“Nope. Not a chance.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Miya wheedles. “Why not?”

“I think you’re overestimating how close we are,” Kojiro replies, deflecting. “We’re not even proper friends.”

“But you know so much about him,” Shadow breaks in. “I’m sure you can at least introduce us, right? It’s not that difficult.”

 _If only you knew_ , thinks Kojiro grimly. He says shortly, “It is that difficult. Talk to him yourselves, he’s not as mean as he looks.”

“If he’s not as mean as he looks, why don’t you help us?” Miya asks. “Seems like you’re the authority on him here.”

Kojiro kicks at a stone. “Why are you all ganging up on me? This isn’t fair.”

“It’s not supposed to be fair.” Miya again—spending his childhood at the skate track clearly hasn’t given him any manners. “You know we’re right.”

“I _know_ you don’t need me to introduce you.” He’s probably going to end up giving in eventually since Miya is incorrigible, but dragging his feet will stop it from happening sooner than he wants.

“But it would be nice,” Miya counters. “And he’ll actually talk to us if we’re with someone he knows. Correct?”

Kojiro flails. “I mean…yeah, but—”

“Great, then!” he exclaims, clapping his hands. Kojiro wants to scream. “He’s coming this way, I think. Just act natural.”

Natural, in Miya’s book, evidently consists of making direct eye contact with Kaoru and trying to make him as uncomfortable as possible. 

It doesn’t work. 

Kaoru keeps walking towards them, and Kojiro flinches away almost imperceptibly.

“Kao—Cherry Blossom,” he says first when Miya doesn’t open his mouth. “This is Miya. He’s a child prodigy,” he adds, part-compliment and part-insult. Miya jabs him in the rib with one of his bony elbows and Kojiro almost doubles over. “He’s interested in your skateboard,” he manages to get out, clutching his stomach.

One of Kaoru’s eyebrows quirks up. “Oh?” 

“Yes,” Miya breaks in, stepping forward. He reaches out a hand. “Tell me your secrets,” he says, tactful as ever.

“I don’t think I will,” Kaoru replies. He pulls down his mask and his mouth tightens. “You have to learn yourself, and I don’t tutor little brats.”

Miya’s eyes widen, but he quickly recovers. “Fine!” he huffs, stomping one foot childishly. “I didn’t care that much anyway.”

Shadow rolls his eyes and steps in. “What he means is we’re not letting you win next time.” Kojiro doesn’t know why he was expecting Shadow to defuse the situation, but the way Kaoru’s eyes narrow suggests that they won’t be getting out of this quickly.

“He doesn’t mean that,” Kojiro says, flailing his hands quickly. Kaoru looks unimpressed. He sees Shadow and Miya glaring at him and quickly deflates. “Okay, maybe he did mean that. But they’re not bad, I promise. They’re just not used to—being nice to people.” He glares at the two of them, but Miya pointedly stares back and Shadow looks away. “They want to be friends.”

Kaoru bores into him with his steely gaze. “They better prove it.”

Kojiro can practically taste the animosity thick in the air. He gulps. 

Their distance has clearly been forgotten in favour of spite. And Kojiro wants _so_ badly to lean into the familiarity of it all, the camaraderie he’d held with Kaoru for so long that he knows better than himself.

But he holds back.

“Of course,” he says, instead of retorting with a snappy remark. “Hear that, guys?” He turns to Shadow, looking miffed, and Miya, who’s messing with the ears of his cat hoodie. “I know you don’t like doing shit, but—”

“Hey!” Miya glowers. “I like doing things. Mostly.”

“Sure,” Kojiro says doubtfully. “Do things and maybe Kaoru will offer you a lesson or two.”

“Kaoru?” Shadow asks at the same time as Kaoru’s leg flies out to swat Kojiro behind the knees. Kojiro’s legs buckle.

“What the _hell_ ,” he says indignantly. “That was completely unwarranted.”

“Don’t call me that,” Kaoru spits out. “I’m serious.”

(Kaoru’s name breathed between pairs of lips in sleepy morning kisses, from Kojiro’s mouth when he wanted to make Kaoru mad; hand in hand on the streets of Buenos Aires. 

A vignette of nights spent on walks next to moonlit monsoon drains, radio static fizzing in the air, their arms intertwined so tightly it would be hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Kaoru’s name falling softly in a paper chain of apologies—pleading, praying, begging. Taking words back. Asking to take _him_ back. Saying goodbye.)

 _Kaoru, Kaoru, (please, I’m sorry,) Kaoru, his name is—_ “Cherry Blossom,” Kojiro says with finality. “There.”

Kaoru’s face goes blank, something odd passing across his shadowed eyes before being replaced by bored indifference. “Good.”

Miya looks on, interested. “This has been a great introduction,” he interrupts. “But I should get going. My mom says I need to sleep by ten every night.”

Kojiro stifles a laugh. “Your mom is right. You don’t get enough sleep by half, kid,” he answers, ruffling Miya’s hair.

Miya scowls. “Shut up.”

“No thanks.”

Miya hops on his skateboard and pushes off down the main road. 

Shadow stands up and waves. “I’m going to turn in too. I’ll beat you next time, Cherry,” he says, but he trips over a rock halfway through the sentence and it doesn’t sound nearly as threatening as it’s supposed to. “Bye, Joe.”

“Good night,” Kojiro calls after him.

And it’s just the two of them, facing each other awkwardly, skateboards tucked under their arms. Kojiro scuffs the toe of his shoe on the dirt.

“Have a good night,” he says eventually. “Don’t work too hard.”

“Aren’t you going to try and beat me too?” Kaoru asks, twisting the loops of his mask with a finger.

Kojiro smirks. “You wish. I gave up on beating you a long time ago.” The admission is too raw to sound casual. That’s how it’s been forever—Kaoru in front, Kojiro a few steps behind. No matter how fast he runs, no matter how far he reaches for Kaoru, he’s still back in Okinawa and Kaoru is in Taoyuan, Taiwan, living out his dreams alone.

Kojiro is tired of trying to catch up.

“A long time ago,” Kaoru repeats. “How long?” It’s barely above a whisper.

Kojiro lifts his shoulders and drops them. He feels an awful lot like crying. “Six years. Maybe more.” He makes an involuntary, choked sound in the back of his throat. He knows that Kaoru hears it, but he tries to pass it off as a cough anyway.

Kaoru is silent.

“Look,” Kojiro tells him finally. “We both made mistakes. It’s over,” he goes on, and his heart compresses into a tiny capsule of regret. “I just—can we stop?”

“Do you not want to be friends anymore?” Kaoru’s face doesn’t betray his emotions, but the slight wobble of his voice does.

“Kaoru—Cherry Blossom,” he corrects himself immediately, rubbing his face with a hand. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“Tell me what you mean then,” Kaoru grits out scornfully, a challenge burning in the golden rings of his irises, and Kojiro almost blurts out, _you’re beautiful_ , but stops himself just in time.

“Let’s just…keep our distance, okay? Like before.” And _before_ —before what? He can’t remember a time he _wasn’t_ in love with Kaoru, a time he could speak to Kaoru without blushing, a time Kaoru wasn’t the first person he thought of in the morning and the last one at night.

Kaoru understands him anyway. “Okay. Friends,” he states. 

Kojiro nods. He feels like he’s dying inside. Curling tight in on himself, his ribs cutting into his lungs and his bones aching with something that sits hot and heavy in his gut. Something a lot like guilt.

━━━━━━

They fall into a new sort of routine, easy as anything. 

Their conversations are still uncomfortable and constrained by the limits of what used to be, but Kojiro has far less trouble calling Kaoru to remind him to eat or sleep, and sometimes Kaoru will come by his restaurant after hours for food that Kojiro willingly offers.

Once in a while, Kojiro finds himself saying too much or touching Kaoru’s shoulder for too long and they’ll both jerk back like they’ve been burned. 

In general, though—in general, it’s nice. Kojiro hadn’t realized how much he missed seeing Kaoru’s face every day.

He’s lying awake in bed one night when it hits him: _what if Kaoru goes away again_?

It was difficult enough in the first place. Kojiro had imagined saying so many things to Kaoru the next time they saw each other.

He hadn’t said any of them. 

Moreover, he hasn’t _learned_ anything from last time. He doesn’t know how he’d managed to live _years_ without seeing Kaoru’s face, and he doesn’t think he can do it again.

Everything is different now, of course. There are residual pangs of heartache—feelings leftover from six years worth of diluted longing—that hit Kojiro every so often when the light of the moon hits the arch of Kaoru’s brow just so or his eyes shine molten gold and the lump in Kojiro’s throat makes it hard for him to speak. 

But for the most part, it’s boiled down to a strange mixture that toes the line between regret and resolve.

Kojiro visits Shadow at his day job when the restaurant is closed for a holiday. The smell of flowers permeates the air and Shadow pops up from behind the counter, his mop of orange hair bobbing. 

“What are you doing here?” he asks incredulously, mouth hanging open. 

Kojiro just waves. “Saying hello, obviously. All my friends are busy and I’m bored.” He picks up a bouquet of yellow carnations. “Think I should send these to someone? I haven’t gotten laid in a while.”

Shadow’s nose scrunches. “No,” he says decisively. “Yellow carnations mean rejection. Don’t you have other people to bother?” he asks, neatly stepping over the minefield that is Kojiro’s love life.

Kojiro crosses his arms. “Not really.” It sounds pitiful. “Everyone else is working.”

“I’m working too,” Shadow points out. “Everyone is working except you.”

“Yeah, but you can talk to me while you’re working.”

“What about Cherry Blossom?”

It’s an innocuous question, but Kojiro’s chest twists nonetheless. His shoulders tighten. “What about him?”

“Aren’t you friends with him too?”

“I have no idea if we’re friends or not,” he says honestly. “Besides, he’s not really the type to let people bug him while he’s working.”

Shadow frowns, affronted. “And I am?”

“Yep.” Kojiro takes pleasure in the way Shadow’s face droops in disappointment, all of his features simultaneously falling. Even his hair looks depressed. “You’re just easily distracted. It’s not a personality flaw. Well,” he amends. “It is. But only sometimes.”

“As if you’re not easily distracted either,” Shadow shoots back. “I resent the implication that you are a better worker than I am.”

Kojiro smirks. “That wasn’t an implication. That was just the truth.”

Shadow lunges for him. “Say that again and I’ll—”

The doorbell jingles and a woman steps through the door. Shadow blushes and stands up straight, face flaming redder than Kojiro has ever seen. “Miss manager, I—Sorry!” he stammers. “I’m not—I’ll get back to work right away.”

The woman laughs. “It’s no problem, Hiromi,” she reassures him, her voice lilting. “You’re a wonderful worker. I wasn’t at all worried. Who’s this?” she wonders aloud. She nods at Kojiro.

“His name is Kojiro. He’s my… _friend_ ,” Shadow tells her through gritted teeth. “He’s just dropping by. Kojiro, this is my manager, Rie.”

“Are you interested in buying flowers?” she asks Kojiro, her smile big and kind. “We have different kinds for all your needs.”

“Oh, not at all,” he says hastily, waving his hands around. “I’m not a flower person. I like them and all, I’m just—not very good at taking care of them.”

At their rented studio in Rome, he and Kaoru would wake up before dawn to water the flowers on the porch—magnolias and climbing bougainvillea with a smattering of violets. 

Kojiro would come up behind Kaoru while he was holding the watering can and wrap his arms around Kaoru’s waist, whispering words thick with sleep against the back of Kaoru’s neck.

“That’s not a problem at all,” Rie answers, grinning. “Hiromi can help you, I’m sure. He’s very popular with our customers.”

Shadow flushes darker, the blush creeping down his neck and painting the tips of his ears scarlet.

Kojiro looks around the store. “Well,” he says, the beginnings of a bougainvillea vine unfurling, tentative and shy, in the pit of his stomach and reaching up to tug at his heart. “Maybe not at the moment, but later? I’ll ask if I ever need some. Thank you for the offer,” he finishes, because there's a mile-long list of things he wants to say to Kaoru, plans to say, _needs_ to say, but it never seems to be the right time. Especially now.

Rie nods understandingly. “Take your time. Our doors are always open. Hiromi,” she says, turning to address Shadow. “I’ve got to pick up a shipment of bulbs from a greenhouse quite far away. You’re okay with watching the store until I return, right?”

Shadow nods quickly. “Of course,” he replies, voice high-pitched. “You can count on me.”

“I’m glad,” she responds, a smile playing at her lips. “Goodbye. It was nice meeting you, Kojiro.”

Her keys jingle as she steps out the door and Shadow lets out a loud sigh.

“You’ve got it bad,” Kojiro tells him. “Like, really bad.”

Shadow’s shoulders slump. “You think I don’t know that?” he answers. “She’s too good for me.”

Kojiro rolls his eyes. “She’s definitely into you, dude,” he says, punching Shadow’s shoulder lightly. “You gotta make a move soon.”

Shadow stands up taller. “I’m planning to, I promise. But Joe,” he counters, and Kojiro thinks, _uh-oh_ , since that tone of voice makes it sorely obvious that he’s about to circle back to the minefield of Kojiro’s love life he had diverted the conversation away from earlier. “What about you?”

Kojiro stiffens. “What about me?”

He gets a knowing look from Shadow in return. “How’s your love life coming along?”

“Not great, thanks for asking.”

“I’m serious. I can tell there’s something wrong,” Shadow starts, crossing his arms as he stares Kojiro down. “So unless you want me to ask Cherry—”

Kojiro slaps a hand over his mouth. “Nope! Nope, definitely not,” he says frantically.

When he takes his hand away, there’s a self-satisfied grin on Shadow’s face. “Knew it,” he says smugly. “You’re so obvious, Joe.”

Kojiro grunts. “Fuck off.”

“You’re the one in my shop.”

“Fine,” he relents. “Yes, I—Cherry Blossom,” he starts clumsily. “We used to date. We were…together for a long time,” he amends. ‘Date’ doesn’t seem like the right word.

Shadow nods slowly. “Okay. Then what?”

“What do you mean? We broke up six years ago,” he says dismissively. “He’s clearly over it.”

Shadow mutters something about idiotic people. “You’re obviously _not_ over it,” he replies patiently. “Something happened to make you two so awkward around each other, I know it.”

“Not all of us have some dramatic backstory, Mr. Romantic,” Kojiro snaps. “We’re not like characters in those Regency novels you like so much. It’s not that deep, okay?”

“It’s not _about_ the dramatic backstory,” Shadow retorts. “It’s about true love! It’s about—overcoming the odds and doing everything in your power to be together. It’s about trying and failing and _trying_ again anyway, because maybe this time will be different, and maybe this time you’ll _finally_ say the words you mean.”

Kojiro freezes. “It’s not _true love_ ,” he mumbles.

“I don’t care if _you_ think it’s ‘true love’ or not,” Shadow returns, rolling his eyes. “You still love him, right?”

Kojiro pauses. _Love_ , he thinks, rolling the word over and over in his head like a marble, the prism forming beams of light that illuminate one scene after another: Kaoru at his restaurant near midnight, Kaoru only inches away from his face and ready to yell at him, the weight of Kaoru’s hand in his palm that Kojiro hasn’t felt for so long.

“Kaoru is—an easy person to love,” Kojiro says eventually. “I’ve loved him for a long time. But now I…I don’t think I could stop. And that’s terrifying. Especially since he doesn’t give a fuck about me anymore.”

Shadow peers at him thoughtfully, playing with the stem of a lily as he tucks it in a bouquet bursting with buttercup-yellow flowers, a splash of white among the cheery, warm tones. “Okay,” he murmurs. 

The shop is eerily quiet.

“Okay?” Kojiro echoes defensively, trying to hide the stinging feel of tears welling up in his eyes. “ _Okay_?”

“Yes, dimwit,” Shadow says. “Shut up. I’m trying to help you. Listen,” he adds, his voice taking on a gentler tone. He places the bouquet on the rack and rests his forearms on the front counter. “Love is difficult.”

“No shit,” Kojiro mutters.

Shadow ignores him. “It’s confusing and ridiculous and messy. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for it. It’s not about big acts or—jokes that you can hide behind if you get turned down. Sometimes it’s just…knowing the risks and making the _choice_ to love anyway.”

Kojiro stares at him blankly. The smell of flowers is making it hard to think.

“You really want me to work for this,” Shadow sighs. “Fine. This is a weak analogy, but imagine you’re skateboarding. You’re neck-and-neck with someone else. You can either stay on the path everyone expects of you, which isn’t the fastest. But it’s dependable.”

Kojiro wrinkles his nose. “I don’t know where this is going.”

“Let me finish,” Shadow replies, swatting him. “You can take that path. Or you can take the ramp to the side, the one that you’ve never tried before. It'll give you more momentum. And if you do it right, you could gain a massive lead. There are so many things that could go wrong with that one, though. You could do it wrong and break your nose or your arm. It might not even lead to the same destination, for god’s sake. So, two not-great choices. But given the opportunity, wouldn’t you—”

“Choose the ramp,” Kojiro says. Everything clicks. “Take the risk.”

“Exactly,” Shadow answers, sounding pleased. “You don’t have to love him, Joe. You can _choose_ to take that risk—or not. But honestly? I think you’ve already decided for yourself.”

Kojiro closes his eyes. “It doesn’t matter if I’ve decided or not. He doesn’t want me.”

“I don’t know what happened to make you think that,” Shadow replies softly. “But sometimes a good talk is all you need.”

Kojiro is silent for a second. Then, he grins widely at Shadow and says, “Damn. When did you get good at relationship advice?”

Shadow exhales. “I have a lot of practice. Almost everyone who comes here wants flowers for their relationship problems. Especially the melodramatic teenagers. God, if I had twenty yen for every time one of them slouched in with their silly little phones and silly little haircuts and said, ‘my girlfriend dumped me because I don’t pay attention to her, but I spent five minutes with her two weeks ago, what’s the cheapest bouquet I can get to say sorry?’ I’m thinking of putting up a sign just to stop them from coming here.”

“Do I _look_ like a melodramatic teenager to you?” Kojiro asks, ignoring Shadow’s rambling.

“What answer do you want?”

“You—get back here!”

━━━━━━

Kojiro can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen Kaoru cry. It’s always been when he’s under stress—exams or post-graduation dread or something to do with Adam, seeing him run around nearly killing people with his misplaced recklessness.

Kaoru cried, that time in the Taiwan hotel. The air smelled like smoke and street food. The hotel soap was tangerine-scented.

He sat down with Kojiro on the hotel bed and said, “I’ve made arrangements to stay here for a while. I got an apprenticeship with a famous calligraphy master.”

And then Kojiro asked how long, and Kaoru answered, _at least a year_. 

The hope was so palpable in his voice that Kojiro tried to be happy, felt a flicker of joy ignite before it was swallowed by the heavy blanket of panic and anger and dismay.

“Why didn’t you—ask me first?”

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I wasn’t…sure if you wanted me to take it. I’m sorry.”

Kaoru kept talking, but Kojiro could already feel him getting further and further away.

“Don’t come back, then,” Kojiro said, after Kaoru told him they probably wouldn’t be able to see each other for a while. “Stay here. It doesn’t mean much to me anyway.” Guilt bubbled under the surface of his skin. It felt like it was burning him from the inside out.

And—god, the way Kaoru’s face shut down after that, like he’d been emptied and taken apart completely, his lip wobbling as he turned away from Kojiro and his eyelashes glittering with unshed tears, burned the memory into Kojiro’s mind more painfully than any words could. 

Kaoru was pretty when he cried, tears glistening like crystals on his pale cheeks. But his eyes were awfully vacant and his lips were chapped and Kojiro wished he could take it back so, so badly. It was all he could do to stifle the sobs rising in his chest at the sight.

He apologized, of course, but the pin had already dropped and Kaoru wouldn’t meet his gaze, and anything he said at that point would have just made it worse. That didn’t stop him from trying.

Kaoru didn’t sleep at the hotel. By midnight, Kojiro’s throat was dry and his eyes were red and swollen, his thumb tired from pressing ‘call again’ over and over again.

He boarded the earliest plane back to Japan the next morning. His first day back home after almost two years of globe-trotting, and Kaoru wasn’t there to share it with him.

━━━━━━

Kojiro dreams about Taiwan for the first time, about the hotel room and Kaoru’s face and the plane ride. The scene is fuzzier in sleep, dulled at the edges. 

The clearest detail is the pounding bass music from the street below them, lingering on the edges like the vestiges of an image that Kojiro can’t quite shake.

He’s merely a spectator. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much, and yet—

When he wakes up, his pillow is wet.

━━━━━━

He and Kaoru are sitting at a booth in _Sia La Luce_ after restaurant hours, a sight that’s become common over the past few weeks. 

Kaoru spins a pen between his fingers. He’s bent over a notepad that he’s been scribbling on in a frenzy all evening, and his phone keeps lighting up with notifications.

Kojiro is wiping down glasses with a clean towel, running the cloth around the edge carefully to make sure it doesn’t leave a mark.

There’s a comfortable two feet of distance between them. Kojiro itches to close the gap, but he holds back. 

He glances out the window and a sliver of the moon peeks through the restaurant canvas-top, streaming across the sky like a luminescent burst of light. It flickers in and out of focus. Coupled with the ambient restaurant lamps, it paints Kaoru’s face in soft, washed-out shades of pale yellow.

Said shades of yellow deepen when a crease appears between Kaoru’s brows. 

“Penny for your thoughts?” Kojiro asks.

Kaoru flinches. The pen between his fingers whirls out of his grasp and skitters across the table. “What?”

Kojiro stops the pen just before it rolls off the table. “You look stressed out.”

“It’s nothing,” Kaoru tells him abruptly. “I have a lot of work to do, that’s it.” 

Kojiro hums. “Can I help?” His writing has never been great, but he opts to ignore that salient fact and extends his hands in offering.

Kaoru’s nose wrinkles. “No thanks.”

“You didn’t have to be _rude_ about it.”

“I wasn’t—I didn’t mean it like that,” Kaoru sighs, massaging his temples. He shoots Kojiro a look, half-annoyed and half-gratified. “Thank you for asking.”

Kojiro sits back. “You’re welcome. I’ll try to help however I can, so tell me if it gets too much, okay?”

“I will.”

They lapse into silence. Kojiro uses the break in the conversation to reorganize a few clean wine glasses, stacking them next to the bar like rows of toy soldiers. He folds the towel and places it in a drawer next to one of the kitchen sinks.

He sits back down. Kaoru doesn’t acknowledge his presence, but Kojiro finds that he doesn’t need him to; he’s perfectly content to sit here and observe Kaoru working away.

There’s a tiny white scar on the tall bridge of Kaoru’s nose, just below where his glasses sit. Kojiro doesn’t remember seeing it before. His hair is shot through with darker pink undertones, barely visible with how low the restaurant lighting is, and his fingers are graceful as he pushes his glasses further up his nose. The sleeve of his kimono slips down, revealing the hint of a tattoo on the underside of his arm.

On Kojiro’s twentieth birthday, they’d gone to a random parlour on the side of Main Street in Vancouver to get their tattoos done—a blue and green koi fish swirling lazily up the length of Kaoru’s forearm, outlined in faded watercolours, and a tiny sun bursting with beams of light on the back of Kojiro’s neck. 

He closes his eyes. The sun tattoo feels like it’s scorching his skin. 

He’d almost forgotten it existed in the first place; he doesn’t see it often, except in pictures or if he looks in the mirror.

But Kaoru—Kaoru sees the koi fish _every day_. When he gets dressed, when he pulls up a sleeve so it doesn’t knock the pot of ink over, when he drives to ‘S’ on his motorcycle and the wind whips around the cuffs of his _yukata_.

Kojiro wonders if Kaoru thinks about him, then. If he thinks about that muggy afternoon when they wandered up and down the street, poking their heads into every storefront; how the sun was bright but the smog obscured it so thickly that it wasn’t much more than an orange fleck; how the mountains rose behind the skyscrapers, striking and tipped with white frost; how the next day when the bandages finally came off, they took turns trailing tired kisses over each other’s tattoos to ease some of the post-inking sting.

Kojiro opens his eyes. 

Kaoru’s hair has fallen over his shoulder and into his face but he flicks it away absently, tapping the head of his pen against the table. His sleeve is hiked up his arm. The koi fish is visible in its entirety.

“How do you rebuild something that’s been broken for too long to fix?” Kojiro says suddenly.

Kaoru’s arm stills. “Excuse me?”

Kojiro swallows. “How do you rebuild what’s been broken for so long you don’t think you can fix it?” It’s about as vague as a question can get, but he knows Kaoru already understands most of it, his analytical brain working overtime to come up with a solution.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. There are no options after that unless you’re thinking about—”

“What can you _do_ at that point?” Kojiro asks, pushing past the brick wall that’s stopping him from getting through to Kaoru, because now that the dam has broken, he can’t exactly take it back. He might as well say it as many times as it takes. “There has to be a way.”

Kaoru looks at him, the confusion in his eyes clearing like mist. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“How much you want to fix it.”

Kojiro’s jaw clenches. “Let’s say I want to fix it more than I’ve ever wanted anything before. Let’s say I can’t rest until I fix it, because it’s damn well keeping me up at night. Then what?” The words spill out of his mouth one by one. 

They both know what he’s talking about.

“I think…” Kaoru answers, his voice steady, “I think it starts with an apology.”

Kojiro looks up at him uncertainly, and he might be wishing it into existence, but he thinks he sees a flicker of hope in the soft curve of Kaoru’s mouth. 

It isn’t quite a full-fledged smile. But it’s nearly there.

Kojiro stares hard at the table. _Apology, huh?_

In his peripheral vision, the koi fish stares right back.

━━━━━━

“Miya,” he says in relief when he finds the boy at the skate park after school. “I need your help.”

“You’re supposed to be at work, old man,” Miya replies breezily, using his left foot to flip the front of his skateboard up. “And my services aren’t free.”

Kojiro scowls. “Forget I asked.” He turns around and makes a beeline for the edge of the park, but a tug on his sleeve stops him.

“Wait.” Miya’s gaze is keen, his green eyes practically piercing into Kojiro’s soul. “Tell me what it’s about and maybe I’ll make an exception.”

Kojiro glances down at him. “You’re going to make fun of me.”

The boy shrugs. “I’ll make fun of you anyway. You might as well get some advice out of it.”

Kojiro hesitates. He opens his mouth and all the words come out in a rush. “Hypothetically, what would you do if you asked someone how to fix your relationship after six years and they said you needed to apologize?”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

Kojiro sighs and tries to rephrase it. “Hypothetically. There’s this person you dated a long time ago—”

“I’m thirteen years old,” Miya deadpans. A cat pads up to them and he scoops it up into his arms, patting it idly.

“I know you’re thirteen years old, squirt,” Kojiro responds, rolling his eyes. “You make me feel older every time I see you. But that’s not the point. Pretend that you dated someone a long time ago. You had a fight, and you didn’t see each other for years. But now they’re back home and you’re still in…you still have feelings for them.” He doesn’t say the word: _love_. Just in case it piques Miya’s interest enough that he tries to dig deeper.

“Okay. So?” Miya asks, raising an eyebrow.

“So you ask them what you can do to mend—whatever you had. And they say you should start by saying sorry.”

“Hypothetically?”

“Hypothetically.”

Miya hums and rubs the cat behind the ears. “Say sorry, then.”

“But _how_?” His voice sounds pitiful even to his own ears.

“This is about Cherry Blossom, isn’t it?” Miya asks flippantly. He rifles through his school bag and comes up with two cartons of banana milk, popping one with a straw and passing the other to Kojiro, who promptly mirrors him. 

The cat jumps out of Miya’s lap and traipses away into the bushes.

Kojiro sips on the milk thoughtfully. He feels like he’s in high school again. “I said it was hypothetical.”

“It clearly isn’t.”

He sighs and leans back, knees pulled into his chest. “Yes, it’s about Kaoru—Cherry Blossom. But I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“Give me more details, and maybe I can help,” Miya answers, eyes flashing bright green with something cunning that Kojiro doesn’t even want to _try_ deciphering.

“This feels like blackmail,” Kojiro points out doubtfully. “Or extortion.”

Miya ignores him. “Are you going to tell me or not? I could always just decide to leave you hanging.”

“Well, I could ask Shadow to help me instead.”

“Shadow’s heard enough of your stupidity. He needs a break.”

Kojiro pauses. “Fine,” he concedes. “You’re right.” Miya’s face splits into a wide smile, and Kojiro immediately regrets ever suggesting he was right. 

He tells Miya about the start of it all; getting together with Kaoru first, going around the world on a gap-year trip—Rome and Almaty and Los Angeles and everything in between. 

“You were in love, I get it,” Miya interrupts. “Get on with it.”

“Kids these days,” he mumbles. Louder: “I’m _about_ to say it. Learn to be patient.”

“No thanks.”

Kojiro takes a second to collect himself before he gets into the details. His eyes sting and Miya listens attentively. “I told him not to come home,” he whispers. “I said I didn’t care about him. Even though I did, of course I did.” He exhales. “I regret it every day.”

“What happened after?” Miya’s voice is hushed.

He blinks fiercely. “He cried. I tried so hard to apologize, y’know, but there are things you can’t talk your way out of. We didn’t sleep in the same room that night. I booked a flight home the next morning.”

He skims over the rest of the story quickly. The fresher the memories are, the deeper they cut, so he barely touches on the stand-out ones: “I went to culinary school. Opened a restaurant. He got a new phone number, so I couldn’t call him, and during that time—I got into a couple of relationships. Slept around for a while. None of it turned out. Didn’t see him again until…two months ago.”

Miya puffs out his cheeks and uses his teeth to adjust the straw of his milk carton. The first words out of his mouth are: “You sure you didn’t make half this up for the shock value?”

He shakes his head, his curls flopping around his forehead. “Trust me, kid. I skipped most of the bad parts.” His throat is dry.

Miya tilts his head. “So what’s the problem?”

“The problem,” Kojiro says, “is that I love him. The problem is that I don’t think I can do this anymore. It _hurts_. And I’ve got no idea how to apologize.”

“If he said you could start with an apology, he must be open to something,” Miya suggests. “He wouldn’t have said that if he wasn’t dropping a hint.”

Kojiro groans. “Yes,” he agrees. “He wouldn’t. Still, it isn’t like I know _how_ open he is to…anything. He might just want to be friends again. Which would be nice, better than it is now. But not what I want.”

Miya rolls his skateboard back and forth with his foot. “Think about it, Joe. If you were in Cherry’s position, would you say _that_ if you only wanted to be friends?”

Kojiro shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Oh my god,” Miya mutters. “Would you _really_ be happy as his friend?”

“I’ve done it for years.”

“That’s not the point.”

Kojiro closes his mouth. The ‘before’ years, hanging on by a thread to his friendship with Kaoru, panicking every time he thought they were drifting away, lonely and aching and cold at night. Wondering if it was even possible that his best friend might like him back.

“…I wouldn’t.”

“Exactly,” Miya says, pointing at him like he’s won a game show. “Think about yourself first. If you find out he isn’t looking for a relationship, be honest with him and maybe he’ll come around. Or you can stop whatever you have right now. But if he _is_ interested, which I think is more likely, then all you have to sacrifice is your bachelor status. And your dignity,” he adds. “But maybe don’t listen to me. I’m thirteen.”

Kojiro pauses. “For a thirteen-year-old, you’re kind of smart.”

“Thank you. I try.”

“How do I apologize to him, though? It’s not like he’d _believe_ me,” Kojiro says dryly. “I wouldn’t even believe myself, honestly.”

Miya shrugs. “Be honest, like you’ve been with me. Make it straight from the heart. If he doesn’t forgive you afterwards, that’s his problem.”

Kojiro sits up straight and tosses his empty milk into a garbage can. It lands cleanly, the plastic making a _swish_ sound as the carton hits the side of the bag. “I can do this.”

“You can,” Miya agrees. “Probably.”

“I can do it,” Kojiro repeats, trying to convince himself. He slumps back down. “I don’t think I can.”

Miya rolls his eyes so hard they look like they might fall back in his head. “Make up your mind, you hag. I don’t have all day. In fact,” he says, his eyes twinkling deviously. “I dare you to do it tonight.”

“Tonight?” Kojiro echoes, scandalized. “No way.”

“It’s a dare, Joe,” Miya sing-songs. “Back out at your own peril.”

He hesitates for a split second and slaps his palms on the cold concrete. “Fine.”

Miya flips the front of his board down and skates off, calling some parting encouragement over his shoulder: “Don’t say something stupid!”

“Really helpful advice.”

━━━━━━

Kojiro finds himself ringing madly at the doorbell of Shadow’s flower shop at eight in the evening. No one answers, and for a second he thinks he might have come just past closing time, but then Shadow’s disgruntled face appears in the window and he exhales deeply.

“Shadow,” he says frantically when the flower-shop employee unlocks the door. “I need your help.”

Shadow’s expression of annoyance melts into resignation. “Joe,” he answers, “I appreciate that you value my advice, but we’re about to close and I don’t have the energy for—”

“It’ll be one second, I promise,” Kojiro begs. “I’ll be gone before you know it.”

Shadow sighs and opens the door wider.

Kojiro sits down on the counter and says, “I’ve got to fix things with Kaoru today.” He doesn’t bother calling him by his skating name; Shadow will know who he’s talking about.

Shadow’s eyebrows raise so high they almost disappear into his bright-orange shock of hair. “Huh,” he gets out finally. “Why?”

Kojiro hesitates. “Miya dared me,” he confesses. “I think I needed a kick in the balls anyway. I was about to chicken out.”

“So…” Shadow motions for him to continue. “How does this concern me?”

“I need flowers,” he answers. “Quick.”

Shadow nods. “And _I_ need money for the flowers.”

Kojiro freezes, but he offers Shadow a grin. “Of course. Can I…what about an IOU?”

“…You _have_ to pay me back tomorrow,” Shadow grumbles. He picks up a bouquet and starts rearranging the petals. “Bluebells,” he mentions as he works. “For everlasting love. Calla lilies,” he continues, “beauty. Camellias. Humility. Chinese bellflower—” and he places the stem of a purple flower at the edge of the bouquet— “Honesty.”

He hands the bouquet to Kojiro carefully. “There are instructions on how to take care of it inside. You better not screw this up.”

Kojiro adjusts his grip. The plastic crinkles. “Thank you so much, Shadow. I’ll pay you back tomorrow!” he shouts, pushing the door open with his foot. 

He runs all the way to Kaoru’s house.

━━━━━━

It’s just before eight-thirty when he arrives at Kaoru’s front doorstep. He knocks three times and passes the bouquet from one arm to the other, shifting his weight uneasily. 

Now that he’s here, he doesn’t quite know what to say. The breeze lifts his hair and he shivers; the sweater wrapped around his waist isn’t doing much to stave off the early-evening chill.

The sound of footsteps, getting louder. There’s a vice grip on Kojiro’s heart and he stands there, paralyzed.

The door opens. Kaoru is in his kimono, his glasses perched on his nose and a steaming mug of tea in his hand. “Kojiro,” he states.

“That’s me,” Kojiro replies, resisting the urge to salute.

Kaoru’s eyes jump to the bouquet nestled in the crook of his arm. “Why are you…”

“Holding a bouquet?’ Kojiro finishes for him. After a nod, he says, “Someone told me everything starts with an apology.”

Kaoru’s forehead furrows. “You better come in,” he responds. “You want tea?”

“Sure,” Kojiro says. He breathes in the smell of Kaoru’s house deep, dark and minty and slightly flowery. The scent is practically etched into his senses after red-eyed nights of cramming for exams and afternoons spent lazing around on Kaoru’s bed wasting time.

He places the bouquet on a side table and sits down at the breakfast counter. Kaoru flicks off the kettle, sliding a piping-hot cup of herbal tea in front of him. 

“Peppermint-flavoured,” he says by way of explanation. “It’s good for colds, they say.”

Kojiro nods. He almost drops the mug from how badly his hands are shaking, and when he finally manages to raise it to his lips, the liquid scalds his tongue. 

Kaoru interlaces his fingers. “Out with it, then.”

Kojiro puts the mug back down. “What?”

“The apology. Go ahead, I’m listening.” He makes a flapping motion with his hand and Kojiro internally steadies himself.

“I was an idiot,” he blurts out. “I’m so, so sorry. For everything. I—I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper. His fingers clench around the mug. “I thought I would be fine without you. I wasn’t. I really _fucking_ wasn’t, and I kept asking myself if I should call you. But you changed your number and I…convinced myself it wasn’t right to look further. I’m sorry for that. You don’t have to—forgive me or whatever.”

Kaoru swallows. “Thank you. I accept your apology,” he says stiffly. 

Kojiro shakes his head. “Not yet. There are…other things I have to say.”

“Okay.”

He stares at his reflection in the swirling tea leaves. His eyes are glassy. “I tried to get over you. All the time. I went on so many dates and I could have learned to love some of them, I _know_ I could have, but I…” he laughs, his voice soft and teetering on the edge of a sob. “I couldn’t help comparing all of them to you. He was pretty; you were prettier. She was smart, but not as smart as you. He was good at coding. You were better. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

Kaoru’s jaw tightens. “I think so,” he answers. He doesn’t say anything else. Kojiro takes it as a cue to go on.

“Someone told me once,” he continues, the words lingering in the air and twisting in ribbons alongside the steam rising from his cup. “Someone told me love was about…trying and failing and trying again. Because maybe it’ll turn out different.” He blinks back a tear. “And maybe this time you’ll say the right thing. So here I am. Trying.” He spreads out his arms. “Taking the ramp.”

Kaoru squeezes his eyes shut. “It’s too late for this,” he murmurs, rubbing his forehead. “Can you give me a moment?”

Kojiro nods.

Kaoru looks down at the counter, tracing patterns into the granite with a fingertip. Five minutes later, he raises his head and looks at Kojiro straight-on. “I should be…honest with you and say that much of the blame is mine.”

Kojiro opens his mouth. “But—”

“I thought a lot about the scholarship,” Kaoru continues, shutting him up. “I talked to everyone I knew. And the general agreement was clear; that I should take it. I didn’t tell you about it until the last second, because…I thought you might tell me otherwise. And that you would persuade me not to go.”

“I wouldn’t have done that,” Kojiro says quietly. 

Kaoru inhales. “I know that _now_ ,” he replies. “But then, I had so many ideas about being independent and not taking bullshit from anyone. To realize that you could change my future in a heartbeat and that I would go along with it _willingly_ —it fucking horrified me.”

“So you didn’t tell me,” Kojiro says.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me?”

Kaoru ignores the question. He stares out the kitchen window, at the sun cresting behind the sparkling ocean waves. “Do you want to know what living in Taiwan was like?”

“Okay.”

“I woke up alone. I ate breakfast, then I went to the academy for my apprenticeship. Sometimes I used my free coupons for bubble tea. In the evenings, I practiced skateboarding alone. And I thought of you. I—” his voice catches. “Everything was a reminder. The food vendor wearing a tropical shirt. The high school students at the skate park. The spaghetti and meatballs I had for dinner. I couldn’t even look at the damn _sun_ without remembering your tattoo.”

Kojiro instinctively places a hand on the back of his neck.

“I wondered what I could have done to make it right,” Kaoru mumbles. “But you never tried to reach out. I just assumed you didn’t want to see me anymore.”

Kojiro’s chest twinges. “I did,” he responds. “Always.”

“…And now?”

“ _Always_ ,” he repeats, more emphatically.

The first time they reach for each other, their touches are tentative, stopping and starting. But by the time Kojiro’s fingers make contact with the curve of Kaoru’s cheek, the initial hesitation is gone and he revels in the comfortable feeling of his hand cupping Kaoru’s jaw, the two pieces slotting together perfectly.

It feels like coming home. 

Kaoru’s hands drift upwards until they rest on Kojiro's shoulders. His fingers dance across the sun tattoo on Kojiro’s neck and into his hair, tugging him down into a kiss.

Their lips meet, and it’s like the universe breathes a sigh of relief, golden rays of light flaring out and wrapping around them tightly with a warmth that Kojiro feels in his bones. 

He rubs his thumb over the skin behind Kaoru’s ear. Something rises in his chest, too fast for him to push back down, and the telltale sting of tears throbs dully behind his eyes. He licks across Kaoru’s bottom lip and pulls away.

“Sap,” Kaoru accuses him, but his eyes shine a bright, clear gold, and his mouth wobbles. He runs his fingers down the length of Kojiro’s arm, coming to rest in his open palm.

Kojiro squeezes his hand. “I’m not allowed to be happy? How rude.”

Kaoru glares at him. “You know I didn’t mean that.” His sleeve slips up to reveal the koi fish and Kojiro outlines the swirls of ink with a light finger. 

They’re both silent. The last remnants of sunlight spill into the kitchen, kissing their backs with warmth in the cradle of dusk.

They’ll have to talk about everything else later—about the events they missed out on, about the birthdays and the milestones and the countless in-betweens.

But for now, this is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos, bookmarks, & comments are all greatly appreciated <3


End file.
